Media Semiotics – an Overview* Gloria Withalm Summary
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Media Semiotics – An Overview* Gloria Withalm Summary: Traditionally, the occupation with media in general as well as with media products/texts takes a prominent position within the field of applied semiotics. Accordingly, we find a great number of semiotically based analyses of media texts both in academic research and in university class rooms, and, over the years, many concepts and notions from semiotics have migrated into communication and media studies. The paper starts with a brief survey on the way “media semiotics” is dealt with in several semiotic reference books (handbooks and encyclopaedia) and proceeds then to a discussion of the relations between semiotics and media studies and the definitions of some core notions like “medium”. Finally, there is an overview of the developments in the various areas from movies to advertising, from television to digital media. Zusammenfassung: Die Beschäftigung mit Medien ganz allgemein bzw. mit Medienprodukten/-texten nimmt traditionellerweise einen prominenten Platz innerhalb der angewandten Semiotik ein. Sowohl in der akademischen Forschung als auch in einschlägigen Lehrveranstaltungen findet sich eine große Zahl semiotisch basierter Analysen von Medientexten, und mit den Jahren sind viele ursprünglich semiotische Konzepte und Begriffe in die Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaften hinübergewandert. Der Beitrag beginnt mit einer kurzen Übersicht wie das Thema Mediensemiotik in den Semiotikhandbüchern und Enzyklopädien behandelt wird und setzt mit einer Diskussion einerseits der Beziehungen zwischen Semiotik und Medienwissenschaften und andererseits der Definitionen einiger zentraler Termini wie z.B. „Medium“ fort. Am Ende steht ein Überblick zu den Entwicklungen in den verschiedenen Bereichen von Film bis Werbung, von Fernsehen bis digitale Medien. * * * When somebody is interested in a topic, she or he will look it up either in books or, choosing the more recent and increasingly popular way to get information, on the internet. A not too sophisticated web search with the two keywords “media” and “semiotics” renders more than 83,000 results (almost a moderate figure compared to some 328,000 results in the case of a search for “semiotics” alone). This number will diminish drastically after a quick check, since the majority of the first some fifty addresses (normally visited) refer either to the few books, which have the words “media semiotics” in the title, or to web pages offering sort of * Paper presented at the conference“Media Semiotics Today – Mediensemiotik heute“. 9th Austrian-Hungarian Semio-Philosophical Colloquium / 9. Österreichisch-Ungarisches Semio-Philosophisches Kolloquium, October 30–31, 2004, Dunabogdány, Hungary 9ÖU / G. Withalm: Media Semiotics 2 directories with links to ever the same handful of sites. So the reader seeking for information will certainly return to more conservative sources, that is printed material, and she/he will look up the entries in diverse dictionaries and encyclopedias, and the respective articles on medium, media studies or media semiotics in introductory works. Such a survey renders not only the information needed, but, moreover, these texts also reveal to what extent the field in our case, media semiotics, is recognized and appreciated as an individual area of semiotic research, or, more generally, whether it is present at all in the consulted texts, and how the topic is dealt with in the pertinent literature. Our knowledge seeking novice, however, will be in trouble. Looking for definitions of, or at least descriptive passages about, media semiotics as a distinct field of semiotic research, analyses and theorizing will not bring much help, since the search does not result in the expected explanations. The same goes for the search for “medium” or “media” which is, again, not very promising. This lack of entries is definitely not caused by a lack of interest of semioticians in the field covered, or, even worse, a neglect of the notion as somewhat irrelevant to semiotics. A possible explanation lies in the comparably late process of academic autonomy and independence semiotics has gone through. Like all disciplines, or even sub-disciplines and paradigms, semiotics has its own set of notions, the definitions of which sometimes overlap and coincide with those found in neighboring and adjacent disciplines, in other cases they differ extremely from those generally known. To construct a concise terminological building in its own right, semiotic dictionaries and handbooks have to concentrate on the core terms. Although the process of mediation is by definition fundamental to semiotics and thus a pivotal area of semiotic reasoning, a crucial topic of semiotic research, and despite the interest in the field and the wide-spread use of the notion, “medium” as such is not a genuinely semiotic concept. After all, how is media semiotics (or, more generally, medium) dealt with in some of the standard reference works published in the last two decades? Searching for “media semiotics”, or: how informative are handbooks and encyclopaedias? One of the first reference works to start with when searching for notions and concepts is certainly the three-volume Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (Sebeok 1986). The second volume contains an article titled “Medium”. Unfortunately, the one and a half pages give no information whatsoever on medium, let alone media semiotics, since they are dealing with nothing but the notion referred to in the subtitle: “Message”. This is somehow strange as there is another entry explicitly titled “Message/Medium” which in turn discusses nothing but Marshall McLuhan’s view of the “medium/message” complementarity. Though comparably small in size, the Glossary of Semiotics (Colapietro 1993) is usually a good spot for a first check on notions. With regard to our subject, the reader is less successful since the book has not a single entry on medium or media, let alone on media semiotics. 9ÖU / G. Withalm: Media Semiotics 3 Another possible source is the index to the first 100 volumes of Semiotica, (1997). It offers a “Subject Index: Scientific Fields” which, although quite detailed, does not even list the category key word medium or media. Looking more closely through the list of fields reveals, however, that the observation must not be read as a lack of papers on media topics: there are 2 articles subsumed under the heading “communication”, 28 under “cinema”, some 40 more under “film”. The same happens to the reader with the Encyclopedia of Semiotics (Bouissac 1998), at least at first sight: she/he will not find an individual article on medium or media. Thanks to the index other entries can be checked to find something on the “ideological role of media”, on “transformations”, “violence”, and “women in media”. In addition, Media is generally cross-referenced to Mass Communication which has an entry. Further articles are dealing with “semiotics of advertising”, cartoons, cinema, comics, communication, computer & computer-mediated communication, film semiotics (plus additional entries on: grande syntagmatique, imaginary signifier, and Christian Metz), mass communication, photography, pictorial semiotics. The Handbuch der Semiotik was first published in 1985 in German; in 1990, a heavily revised English version, the Handbook of Semiotics, appeared, which was the basis for the 2nd German edition (Nöth 1985/1990/2000). The 1990 English version grouped several chapters dealing with topics usually subsumed under “media” under the heading “Aesthetics and Visual Communication”. It is only the 2nd German edition which features a chapter IX. explicitly titled “Mediensemiotik”. The areas presented are: media, image, image and text, maps, comics, photography, film, and advertising. The subject index, however, enumerates several other instances where the notion media is discussed. Taking up ideas first presented in his introductory contributions to two collective volumes (Nöth 1997b, 1998), Nöth starts his chapter IX.1. on “media” with some general observations on the relationship between semiotics and the media, naming both early examples of semiotic studies of media texts and several strains and ideas within semiotics adopted for media studies. He then continues with three subchapters dealing with: “themes of media semiotics”, “signs, medium and the media”, and “signs, reality and hyper reality”. Like many other volumes, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Media and Communications (Danesi 2000 ) has no description of the field of media semiotics, but, of course, it includes an entry on medium which will be discussed below since it offers a concise definition of, and approach to, the notion. Semiotik/Semiotics, subtitled Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur/A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture, is so far the largest (and most recent) reference work (Posner/Robering/Sebeok 1997-2004). Because of the overall structure of the handbook, the central article on the topic in volume 3 has the term in question – media semiotics – only in the subtitle (and unlike “semiotics of culture” or “cultural semiotics”, the notion is not listed in the index either). However, the text on “Semiotic aspects of mass media studies: Media semiotics” (Wolf 2003) gives a good overview on the relationship between the two adjacent, or even overlapping, fields. Starting from the history of mass media studies, Wolf 9ÖU / G. Withalm: Media Semiotics 4 continues to outline the main areas of mass media